Some of you may have noticed our recent downtime. The RPG Palace account was blocked by our hosting company due to CPU overuse. It turns out 98% of the traffic that generated that CPU spike came from one IP: 68.12.42.100. This resolves to a Cox address in Oklahoma. This IP address has been blocked. I apologize if that was any of you, but as far as I know we didn't have any Oklahomans here. Of course, if it was somebody here, we'd never know unless we went around and asked every individual person, "is RPG Palace back up for you?"

Some of you may have noticed already, and you're probably noticing now: several parts of the website have had a major style upgrade. This includes the front page news feed, the blogs page, and the resource gallery.

Resource gallery? What you say?

I have put together a Drupal-based resource gallery, and it's mighty fine if I do say so myself. Say what you will about Drupal not being designed with forums in mind; this kind of "I want this specific data type to be arranged in this way kkthxbai" thing is exactly what Drupal is good at.

Consider this the official announcement: RPG Palace is converting software in a few days from IPB 2.1 to Drupal 6.19. This is more than just the forums; the entire site will be moved into Drupal, including existing news, tutorials, articles, and downloadable content.

Private messages will be lost. If you have any important information in your private messages, save it now.

Some users will need to re-upload avatars, though most avatars will transfer properly.

I think I've got the system set up properly and I want volunteers to test the new site before I do the full migration. What will be entailed:

There is only one forum category, and you'll be having random conversations in it so as to test out your own permissions and site features. At any time you can make suggestions on how I can make it better.

One thing you cannot do is advertise the location of the test website. Since its location will only be privately disclosed, it will not be accessible by search engine or by spambots.

I've changed the category names, and in some cases their organization. They now fit a sort of metaphor of RPG Town as a walled city around a palace. The naming has also changed the purpose of a couple of categories, such as the Spam Bin, now the City Gates, and Concepts and Plots, now Game Maker's Guild.

With the other administrators still in stasis-mode activity, I have decided to promote ChickenSoupCheese to Super Moderator to help with keeping the forums organized. There has been a surge of new members, and while the discussions are all very interesting, they move too quickly for me to follow them all and split topics when the original topic has been abandoned (or when a topic sprang up when there was none in that thread).

It's been a long while since any updates, so let me clarify: RRR is not dead, but it has been so long since I removed the dead link that they don't have us anymore either.

What is the state of the RPG Making community? Is it up? Is it down? The main user base gets older and older, with some of us in our late twenties, and yet RPG Maker continues to attract the kind of youth that we were in its heyday. So where were you, nine years ago, with RPG Maker 2000? Even that was before my time.

I would like to apologise for the significant period that RPG-Palace has been unavailable. Anyone visiting the site over the past couple of months will be aware there have been issues with payment for the site. This is largely due to complications caused by internation transfer of funds; this is partially my fault and it should have been resolved much sooner. I will now be looking for an alternative web host with more suitable payment options to avoid this happening again.